Ear, there's actually a very relevant idea behind your rite. We are such inductive creatures. As David Hume would say, just because bread was nourishing to me in the past does not guarantee that it will always be nourishing to me in the future. Just because I dated a total asshole in the past does not guarantee that all men are assholes.

As weak as the asshole argument is, it's so easy to use personal experience as justification for all sorts of decisions. We will ignore advice from experts because we have uncovered our own way to do something; we will trust a personal recommendation from a friend before we trust an advertisement because of experience implicit in the recommendation. I think some degree of induction is necessary, unless you want to become a total skeptic who has to ask whether the sun is going to rise every morning, and there are certain types of interpersonal exchanges that will always make me uncomfortable because they remind me of the past.

However, I could choose to remain bitter about the past, inflicting my pain on potentially innocent bystanders (whether they've dug their own graves or not). Or, I could choose to accept new opportunities as they are presented without letting past experiences discolor them. The first is easy; the second much more difficult.

Personally, I don't know if I could ever just "shut out" parts of my past completely, but recently (and I mean in the last few months), I have been revisiting a few sets of experiences and trying to learn something from them, as opposed to just letting them make me feel angry/ashamed/etc. For example, I dated someone once who had no sense of money-- earning it, saving it, paying bills as opposed to buying booze with it. He stole from me, overdrew my bank account, and was a pretty violent person-- Look! An asshole! Dealing with money issues has made me tense ever since. I don't have to take out those frustrations on my husband (innocent bystander/not an asshole), but it *is* good for me to acknowledge my feelings. Before we sit down to negotiate finances together, I should make sure that I'm not already tense. I should be fed, rested, and set aside plenty of time so that we don't feel rushed. Rewarding each other once the mortgage has been paid and the books balanced? Also an excellent idea. Those are the lessons that keep me from reliving negative patterns of the past.

Having some sort of rite to realize that you are not chained to the past and can continue to create your own reality? (And in my case, honoring the work that helped me learn from the past?) Completely a worthy idea.

Oh, and re: trusting your own experience vs. trusting the wisdom of sages. . . I have put many years of hard effort into learning to be properly skeptical and sort the intellectual wheat from the chaff. I do a pretty good job of discounting even my own anecdotal evidence if it flies in the face of, say, double-blind clinical trials. So. . . I am an enemy of magical thinking and despise all religions, but I do still see the value of holding people and things sacred when it's done on a personal level and with one's eyes wide open to the allegorical/mythological nature of the thing. If you worship the Grand Babinko and tell me I should get down on my knees with you and do the same lest I be consigned to the flames of Assheim when I die, I'll make fun of you and your crappy inert stone idol. If you worship me, I will worship you back, we can take turns getting down on our knees to each other, and nobody has to go burn anywhere but BRC.

anandaconda wrote:Mine? Thanks-- ananda is Sanskrit for "sheer bliss" or something close to that. And snakes are such transformative creatures. Call them good, call them evil-- but they're always changing. I spent a little bit of time working with a shaman in the Amazon jungle the year I turned 30, and there were some snakes involved. Talk about a rite of passage . . .

There are a lot of activities that most people take rather a while to get good at, just because we don't do them often enough or with enough variety (especially at first). Kissing and sex come to mind, although that tells you more about my mind than the topic Others can include art, certain other sports, cooking, critical thinking, relaxing...

So my proposed Rite of Passage would be a ritualized form of doing any one of these specific activities over and over until you're actually good at it. This could mean kissing 40 people a day - and then repeating it, with the same people, every day for a week. Or cooking ten hours a day for a month. Or drawing until you can't feel your hands. It's the principle behind retreats of various sorts, or other intensive encounters, but it's usually only applied to a limited set of skills and talents - and there are so many more gaps, things that take people many years to learn.

Last edited by jenkalea on Sun Aug 07, 2011 8:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

wow Jen thats a clever post, I like your thinking and after a little thinking of my own i have to agree, there are a few things i have resigned myself to never being good at like drawing (not for want of trying), your comment about kissing reminds me of advice i took from a book (stranger in a strange land) about how to make kissing better - think of nothing else while you are doing it, devote your whole body and mind to the experience, while you are kissing just be kissing that person give them your whole attention - not how you are going to do it or what you are going to next but just what is happenning Now. I guess that can be applied to anything you want to excel at.

FREE THE SHERPASBurners with torches is right and natural and just.-fishy.CATCH AND RELEASE.

Hey there Grai! Nice reference. I'd not thought of that at all. God I love you man. I can't wait to see you in the dust and share water with you. You grok?

Gaminwench! I have been wondering where SfS was to be located. It figures. Almost everything I'm interested in (with the exception of a few "special friends") is located within a block of me and terminal City. I'm so glad you posted! We were talking about SfS a month ago or so and I am very interested. Yay for Sfs AND Gaminwench!

He's a mystery wrapped in a riddle, inside an enigma, painted in hot pants. - SavannahPropane ToysHow to do it wrong: